Madison school shooting: Witness said she thought gunshot was balloon popping

View full sizeDave Dieter / The Huntsville TimesFirst Sgt. Robert Fearn escorts his daughter, Janelle Lawrence, from the school. She was standing next to the shooter when he pulled the trigger.View full sizeThe Associated PressJanelle Lawrence and her father.SubmittedTodd Brown in a yearbook photo.

MADISON, AL -- A Discovery Middle School student said she was a few feet away when Todd Brown was shot and initially mistook the sound of the gunshot for a popped balloon.

Janelle Lawrence, 15, a ninth-grader, said late Friday afternoon she was a few feet away from the shooting in the ninth-grade hall. Brown, 14, was talking to friends and Lawrence was talking to a girlfriend.

"I looked over and heard this big 'pow,' like a balloon popping," Lawrence said, adding that she and her friend both saw the gun.

The students Brown was talking to immediately ran away. Lawrence said she went over to Brown, who was lying motionless in the floor. She thought he might have passed out, but a girl standing next to her said he had been shot.

She said the girls yelled for a teacher, and teachers ran out of their rooms and pushed the students out of the hall.

Lawrence said the shooter went in a boys bathroom.

"He walked into the bathroom and put the gun in the last stall, is what a lot of the students said in their statements to the police," Lawrence said. "He just sat in the stall until police came and got him."

Lawrence said she shared a lunchroom table with the shooter last week. She said Brown, with whom she had a math class, was smart, funny and played on the football team. Lawrence said she thought she was in danger after the shooting.

"School is supposed to be a safe place," she said.

Lawrence said she doesn't know if she can return to school Monday.

"I'll be nervous," she said. "I know when I pass that spot in the hall that I'll cry."